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Friday, November 14, 2003

Arabs Motivated by Hope, Not Despair

What is the Arab motivation to fight us? The Left claims that the Arabs are motivated by despair. They have nothing to lose, and consequently they are committing suicide. Until now, no-one has seriously attempted to challenge this argument. The National Camp has accepted as axiomatic the basic assumptions of the Left, that the Arab despair was due both to a lack of national self-determination and to their economic plight. Thus granting self-determination to the Arabs and improving their economic conditions would arouse their sense of hope, eliminate despair, and remove their motivation to fight.

However, this argument fails to fit the facts: prior to the Oslo Agreements there were no suicide bombers. Indeed the appearance of the suicide bombers was after the Oslo Agreements, Israel’s tremendous concessions, and the hopes they engendered.

The Arabs in Israel have never sought self-determination. There is not and there has never been such a thing as a Palestinian nation. There has never had a Palestinian state, and there is no cultural difference between an Arab living in Nablus or one in Damascus – neither in language, religion, nor customs.

The Arabs in Eretz Israel had no independent national aspirations before the coming of Zionism. Even afterwards, the Arab national aspiration focused solely on the territory in which the Jews lived. The national Arab movement never focused its aspirations on Eretz Israel but on the State of Israel. It directed its claims solely against those regions which the Jews attempted to hold. The War of Independence was not caused by the issues of Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, or the right of Arabs to return to their former homes. All these issues were left to the Arabs by the UN partition plan. The War of Independence was initiated by the leaders of the Arab nationalist movement in Israel, solely in order to prevent the Jews from establishing their own State in a territory far smaller that that bounded by the "green line".

The Arabs of Eretz Israel never had any national claims regarding Judea, Samaria and Gaza when these areas were controlled by the Jordanian Arab Legion and by the Egyptians. The PLO was established before the Six Day War and focused its national aspirations within the borders of the "green line", on the territory held by the Jews after Israel's War of Independence. It was only after the Six Day War, when Yesha and Jerusalem were liberated by the IDF, that the situation totally changed: the stolen Palestinian homeland was no longer the coastal plain but apparently only the mountain region. Why? Because the Jews were holding it.

We can therefore see that the Arab motivation is not of a positive national nature. They have no desire to return to a "homeland" in order to realize their "Palestinian" nationalism. The moment any Arab army, whether of Jordan, Iraq, Syria, or Egypt, holds any territory in Eretz Israel, Palestinian nationalism vanishes without trace. The motivation of the Arabs of Eretz Israel is negative – they simply don't want us as Jews to be there.

No-one has ever accused British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin of being pro-Jewish, but his 1947 analysis has been demonstrated to be correct:

"To the Jews, the essential point of principle is the creation of a sovereign Jewish State. To the Arabs, the essential point of principle is to resist to the last the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in any part of Palestine."

It is difficult for Western ears to hear such discordant sounds, but this is the reality, and for the purposes of the current discussion it will be sufficient for us to prove this argument.

If the Arab motivation is of a negative nature, this does not mean that the Arab violence is due to despair. On the contrary, it is motivated by hope. The Arabs cannot be in despair because of what they didn't receive (since they once held everything). Rather, they are full of hope for what seems to them to be the realization of their dream: to eliminate Jewish sovereignty in Eretz Israel.

It can be shown that the more the Jews abandoned their national aspirations in Eretz Israel, the greater the Arab’s thirst for murder and their motivation to fight. We did not encounter acts of suicide in the past. They occurred on after the State of Israel had recognized the existence of the "Palestinian nation", their legitimate aspirations, and their right to establish a state in Eretz Israel. Fostering their hope was the source of the violence; removing the Arabs' hope of driving us out of our country will instill calm.